Michael Walker: If you’re listening to this then you likely already know that being an independent musician can be a lonely road. And maybe your friends and your family don’t fully understand why you do what you do, or why you invest so much time, energy, and money achieving your music goals. And especially early on, it can be hard to find people who really understand what you’re trying to accomplish and how to make it happen. So, that’s where Modern Musician comes in!

My name’s Michael Walker and I can understand and relate to that feeling. I’ve been there myself, and so has our team of independent artists. The truth is that basically everything good in my life has been a result of music. It’s the reason I met my wife, my 3 kids, it’s how I met my best friends. And now with Modern Musician, we have seen so many talented artists who started out with a dream, with a passion, without really a fanbase or a business. And you’ll take that and turn it into a sustainable full-time career and be able to impact hundreds, maybe even thousands or millions of fans with your music. We’ve had thousands of messages from artists who told us we’ve helped change their lives forever. It just gets even more exciting and fulfilling when you’re surrounded by a community of other people who get it, and who have shared their knowledge and success with each other openly. So, if you are feeling called into making your music a full-time career and to be able to reach more people with your music, then I want to invite you to join our community so that we can help support your growth and we can help lift you up as you pursue your musical dreams. You’ll be able to interact in a community with other high-level artists, coaches, and industry professionals, as well as be able to participate in our daily live podcast, meet these amazing guests, and get access to completely free training. If you’d like to join our family of artists who truly care about your success, then click on the link in the show notes and sign-up now. 

 Gemma Sugrue: In social media, the number one thing you have to be optimizing for every single time is emotion. What you're trying to do is get people to take action on it: like it, comment on it, save it, share it. And if you want to put people into motion, you have to use emotion. And that's like your number one job. And we're the ones that are good at that. We're artists, we're creatives, we're performers, we're expressive. So it's just trying to really help unlock artists in that video format. 

Michael Walker: It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high-quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate a sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution in today's music industry and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.

All right. So I'm excited to be here today with Gemma Sugru. So Gemma is a renowned vocalist and vocal coach. She's worked with artists like Bon Iver and Damien Rice. And she used to be heavily involved in the world of vocal coaching and she still has a lot of expertise in vocal coaching, but she's also been expanding to focus more on peak performance and in business as well. And so today I'm excited to have her on the podcast to be able to talk about probably the number one most important thing that separates our ability to be successful or not, which is our brain between our skull. Between our skull? We have one skull, but you guys know what I mean. [laughing]. And so we're gonna be talking about peak performance, how to be a content creator and dial in your personal branding, and becoming comfortable with being seen and heard, which, for a lot of us as musicians is both, something that we want, but also can be extremely scary. Gemma, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. 

Gemma Sugrue: Delighted to chat. Thanks for having me, Michael.

Michael Walker: Absolutely. So to kick things off, I'd love to hear just a little bit about your background story and how you became a performance coach in the first place.

Gemma Sugrue: It's been a winding road that continues to wind and keeps me interested. I started out as a singer, I went through the process of training as a classical singer, emerged out of that and set up a singing school and started getting really interested in helping singers be contemporary singers instead. I couldn't demonstrate that. So I had to go off and figure out how to sound like Adele and not like an opera singer. And I ended up falling down quite the rabbit hole of voice science and going around the world to different conferences and figuring it all out and piecing it together and bringing it back to Ireland, to my studio there. Then I sold that studio in 2021 to new owners and I set up something online and I became super interested during COVID.

I obviously did a pivot there to online and I became super interested in helping people make original music. I was like: okay, you've got this opportunity online. And if you could only work with one kind of singer, who would you pick? And I'm like: I want to help people bring new things into the world. So I just made that my niche and they came along and I was helping them with vocals, but of course all these other things presented themselves; other problems presented to be solved so I got very excited about solving them all. Trying my best. Got people in to help me with the songwriting side of things. But I was helping them be seen online, helping them with the psychology of that, connecting them with other people. That became a really important part. I found that it was a very isolating thing to go through on your own as a writer. And there's a lot of people in different parts of the world that doesn't have a great, thriving, music network. And so, being able to put them into co-writes and collaborations has been a big part of my work within that program, True Artist.

I'm always interested in optimizing myself. I've been a self development girl for as long as I've known myself. So I've always been sucked into that and optimizing everything. I can be intense. I can be obsessive about these things. So I go all the way. But I like to tell people what happened after I went all the way to: we have to sauna every day and this is what will happen. You have to do ice baths every day. I do all these experiments, like a biohackery kind of thing. And then I get all excited and I want to share it with everybody. And then I just have to put in the caveat that like: I'm extreme, find your own place in the continuum of that. So I've been helping people with the kind of 360 of how to be an independent artist and live a good life.

Michael Walker: That is awesome. In terms of the cold plunge, are you still doing that? And do you do it daily? I've been doing it for about a month and a half now, once a day. Gemma Sugrue: It’s good, isn't it? It's just free drugs.

Michael Walker: Yeah, it's definitely an experience. Yeah. Yeah. I'm probably pretty hooked. I'm probably going to be doing it for at least... I don't know. I can't foresee me not doing it. The benefits from doing it are great.

Gemma Sugrue: It's fantastic. And it's funny because I'm a retired performer now as well. And when I first started singing, I was trained as an opera singer and they were the most intense gigs I ever had to do. Especially like a recital format. It's so exposing. Your technique has to be so on point and you can't hear a pin drop. And the adrenaline in those experiences was peak. And for the first time since I started doing ice baths, I was in the ice bath and I had this insane urge to sing an aria. And I was like, what is going on? I just, I don't think I'm going to be able to not sing this aria. I'm going to have to do it. And it's in a public ice bath. And I was like, oh my God, my body is so conditioned to that level of adrenaline that it's start singing. It's time to sing. And I'm like: Oh, what's happening? So it's cool. I definitely think there's massive performance development benefits and I have been advising singers to practice in the cold shower, even run your lyrics under the cold shower so that you can condition yourself to those levels of adrenaline.

Michael Walker: That's wild. Yeah. I'd never heard of the correlation between vocalists and cold baths, but maybe for anyone who's listening to this right now, who is like: what the heck are they talking about? Like cold baths or cold plunges? What, why would anyone do that? Maybe you could share a little bit about the background behind what, what exactly we're talking about and what are the benefits?

Gemma Sugrue: Yeah. So your body basically releases certain neurochemicals like dopamine and adrenaline. You're basically going into hypothermia very slowly, but you won't die until you stay there for 45 minutes. Of course, it depends on what temperature the water is at, but it does give the body a really lovely boost, a lovely hit of dopamine, and actually more of a sustained boost of adrenaline afterwards as well. It's similar to drugs like cocaine, it's the same neurochemical effect but to me, the benefit is actually, especially if you don't like doing it, it's the: what happens when you get in and do something you don't want to do when you're like: Oh God, it's too cold. I can't do it. There's no way I can do it. And you get in and you do it. And apparently we develop a region in the brain which is called the anterior midsingulate cortex which is responsible for developing our willpower. But once you start liking ice baths, then that stops working. So you've got to, you've got to hate it, do it, and then you'll get that kind of long term willpower development.

Michael Walker: Super interesting. Yeah. I know for me, definitely one of the major benefits has been around discipline and just willpower. Especially early on, it was hard to get into the bath. I remember I really had to psych myself up and I think I did the Wim Hof breathing literally just so I could. But now it's really not too hard but I have found for me the five second rule… I read a book that's all about this one idea of the five second rule which is actually a pretty good pretty good read, but the takeaway from it, you actually don't probably have to read the whole thing… you could literally just get this one insight because this is what the whole book was about: If there's something that you should do, you want to do what you're having a hard time, pushing yourself over the edge to do it… For example, if you're like standing next to a cold plunge and you're like going into it or like jumping off a diving board, then you can hack your brain by doing a countdown of five, four, three, two, one, and then just doing the thing. There's something about that process that. Gets us out of our head in terms of usually like we think about it and we start to overanalyze and we hold ourselves back, but if you can get into a good habit of doing a countdown then you can just do the things right away. So that takeaway has been really helpful for the cold bath, but also for getting out of bed in the morning. Rather than clicking the snooze button, I'll just count down 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and then I'm out. It's like magic.

Gemma Sugrue: Is that Mel Robbins?

Michael Walker: Sounds about right. Yeah, it was an audiobook that I read and it was a woman who had written it.

Gemma Sugrue: Yeah. Gosh, I need to do that. I'm struggling with the winter mornings at the moment, getting out of bed. It's and there's that just 10-15 minutes of lying there being like, what is this? Why am I just? Just get up. It's 15 minutes of my day just gone there. Just having this conversation, like: it's better to stay. No, I think you should get up. But it is very cold. But you do need to go to the gym. I just had this stupid conversation for 15 minutes.

Michael Walker: Yeah. It's definitely worth trying out. Yeah. I can't remember if it was like three seconds for her or five seconds, but the same idea either way. Yeah, you have a countdown and then you just do the thing at the end of the five seconds. But okay, so I'm also curious for an ice bath… Do you have any recommendations for the temperature for it?

Gemma Sugrue: Oh gosh, I can't remember.

Michael Walker: Okay, when I first started going into it, I think I started out like 50 degrees, which is colder than they recommended. And then I heard that Tony Robbins has been doing his morning one at 57 degrees. And I was like, oh man, if Tony Robbins, if that's what he does, and he does that for a few minutes in the morning, like I'll just do that. But I'll, so I've been doing like 55 degrees. But I also listened to a podcast with Joe Rogan, where he was with Andrew Huberman, I think he was talking about the cold baths and Joe Rogan made it seem like it was a big deal that Andrew was doing like 55 degrees ish and he's: Oh, it was like. That’s nothing like, I'd be like 34 degrees. So I know, I'm curious if you had any perspective on that.

Gemma Sugrue: I'm in Centigrade and I use this thing called a cryo spa in my gym. So there are jets when you go in there as well. And I think it's between 10 and 20, but that's centigrade. So it's probably around that ballpark of 50-60. I don't know what the conversion is. But there are days because of people, different bodies going in there, there are days where it's not cold enough. And I don't get any of the hit afterwards. So it's really important that I get in there first thing.

Michael Walker: Interesting. Yeah. We'll move on from here because I'm sure people are not interested in cold pledges, but yeah, I was pretty interested. I was surprised by how accessible it is to get one of these in your home.

Gemma Sugrue: Oh yeah.

Michael Walker: Like for me, it was something I heard about and I was like, yeah, maybe someday when I'm a billionaire, I'll get a cold plunge in my house. But it turns out there's a whole market for these at home tubs and even like little refrigerator units you can get. And it's really not that difficult to set it up and it's pretty cool. Okay, moving on. So talking about peak performance and specifically, one of the focal points that you talked about was helping artists feel more comfortable with being seen, and the psychology of that. I'd love to hear what you mean by that exactly. And having, both helped a lot of artists with the vocal coaching side of it and seeing some of those other problems that they're struggling with, I'm curious what in terms of the psychology of being seen and what artists are struggling with.

Gemma Sugrue: Because most of it's online, getting your head around being seen on video is so different because you're not getting any of the good stuff back. When you're performing, you're exchanging energy live in a room. When you're performing on camera, there is only you giving and hoping that you'll receive. And then when you do get to the receiving part, it can be very overwhelming. Either it's apathetic, nobody has liked anything. Maybe it's overwhelmingly successful. And you're like: Oh, that video blew up. Oh, brilliant. That's when I didn't put my makeup on… or maybe it doesn't go well. Or maybe you get a comment that's not very nice. And of all the things that affect us emotionally, human interaction is always going to be the thing that has the biggest impact on our emotions, either negative or positive. So it's an emotional minefield being out there and being seen. I ask artists to understand that you're living with fear. Not in fear, but you're always living with fear and knowing that this fear is going to be triggered more in you than anyone else because you are separating yourself from the pack, which makes your brain and body feel very unsafe. And you're having to negotiate something very challenging. Of course, it gets easier. Of course it gets better and you get normalized to it, but even for me, I've been out there and I've been, even for me, there's ups and downs that and I have to really go, is that a rational thought or is that me just scared of maybe being embarrassed or being out there too much or feeling uncomfortable or having a vulnerability hangover? So there's that side of things and negotiating through the different things like getting up in the morning out of bed, all the voice that says, don't get up in the voice that says, get up, the voice that says, live stream and the voice that says, do not embarrass yourself. No, one's going to show up. It's going to be mortifying. We're having to negotiate and listen and understand about that. The other thing that comes across well on camera is: there's an art to it. Like, it's performance art. And I do a lot of analysis for my students where I'll get them to submit their videos and we'll go through them. And there's a couple of things that we tend to see one of them in congruency with what their body is saying and with what their voice is saying. So their body is saying don't look at me. I'm not comfortable. I'm worried. And their voice is singing a beautiful love song, but you can tell that their body is expressing: I hope I hit the high note. I hope I remember this lyric. I hope the people like this. So trying to get things really congruent and then they'll wonder why the video didn't get engagement. And I'm like: it's because of the incongruency and it's a very subconscious thing for the viewer. The viewer doesn't know that's why they didn't click with it, but we pick up all of this language that we're looking at and we're seeing in faces and in the body and I'm like social media, the number one thing you have to be optimizing for every single time, is emotion. What you're trying to do is get people to take action on it: like it, comment on it, save it, share it. And if you want to put people into motion, you have to use emotion. And that's like your number one job. And we're the ones that are good at that. We're artists, we're creatives, we're performers, we're expressive. So it's just trying to really help unlock artists in that video format.

Michael Walker: That is awesome. Yeah so much good stuff in there. In terms of helping people overcome that issue of incongruency or them being in their own head or wanting to, wanting to sing a love song, but feeling like shrinking up and doing it. How do you help them through that? What kind of exercises can they do to feel more confident or feel more comfortable and be more in congruence with who they want to be?

Gemma Sugrue: Yeah, so I think the first thing is creating that awareness of it, because so many times we feel like we're not being read, but we're leaking all the time, we're, and even we leak it in the voice what, how we really feel, what we're really thinking will come through. So there's the awareness of it, first of all, and then secondly, I like to see them being comfortable, I'm like, I want to see what your gestures look like, what your mannerisms look like when you're comfortable. So I get them to tell me something that they're familiar with, that they're natural with, that they're used to telling all the time. So a story or something: tell me about where they grew up or especially something warm that kind of brings up good feelings for them. And I'll pay attention to how they move and how they gesture and how they are. And then I talk about that, maybe give them some information about that. And then the next step would be to get really engaged with the text, like the text is their best friend. They need to be in the words and the text will tell you what to do if you're in it. Now, sometimes that might feel overwhelming so to chunk that down a little bit, I give them two main objectives. I say: I want you to decide 1) Your motivation for singing this song. There's some action you want to occur because of singing this song. I'll give the example of And I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston. In my opinion, the motivation of that song is to compassionately break up with someone. And I'm just, that's, I'm on a mission for the next four minutes. I'm compassionately breaking up with someone. And so I don't get too pulled in different directions. I'm just on my mission. And then the second thing I like them to consider is 2) what emotion will get the job done the best? And what emotion do you need? Oftentimes people will say I need to be brave. That's a hard thing to do. It's hard to tell the truth in a nice way. And I'm like, great. You breathe with courage. You move with courage, you stand with courage. And you just pull all of that into your senses and breathing is also, to go on another quick little sidebar, but there's so much in the kind of return feedback loop of how you stand can be fed back to the brain as: well, I actually do feel safe; I am confident. How you breathe is going to signal to the brain and what the emotional state should be as well. So you can reverse engineer it too.

Michael Walker: Super smart. We were just talking about that a couple of days ago on the podcast the two way street between the mind and the body. Now it's interesting that, if we're feeling afraid or we're in fear then we'll curl up into a ball naturally, but you can actually do it the opposite way too. Or if you curl up like in fear, then it actually affects how you feel in your mind versus if you make yourself big and stretch out, then it changes how you feel. Do you have any recommendations for artists who, as performers, they are getting ready to go on stage and, obviously we have a different variety of artists, some who are very confident who've done this a lot and some people who are pretty new.

It can be incredibly scary and challenging to get up on stage. Do you have any recommendations for pre show jitters or how to help artists to be able to manage that? Cause obviously like it's a natural part of the equation. You're going to have a heightened sense of adrenaline and kind of fear getting ready for it. So how do you recommend that people be able to work through that?

Gemma Sugrue: And when you're there, when you're on stage and when the adrenaline hits that much just… Ride the wave and you'll find, you'll feel like you don't remember any of it and you're like, what just happened? And I do think that there is like a process of just being in an adrenaline haze for your first couple of gigs. And actually it can feel great. You'll come often. I remember, especially when I was running my singing studio, and we'd always have these gigs and the kids would come up saying, they're like, I wanna go again. I wanna go again, because it's like putting them on a rollercoaster or something. And they were terrified before they went on, and then they're like “again”. So that's one thing, just enjoy the ride and know that you'll start getting more present, but for it to not be terrifying and for you to not feel those mad butterflies, I think one idea that was shared, was actually shared on the Andrew Huberman podcast by Lisa Feldman. I'd said her… is her name Barrett? She's oh my God, an amazing expert on emotions. But she talked about her kid's karate teacher said to her before she went to fight, she was like 10, and she was about to face off against a 14 year old boy. And he said, get your butterflies in formation. And it was accepting that she's about to go on a big high and it was like: harness them, get them organized, get the troops ready for action. So I think that there's some good stuff in that because you can just decide what the valence is. You can decide the meaning of that heightened, aroused feeling is. So that's one thing.

Now, when we have these feelings, the heart rate is going up, we're sweating, there's physiological things that are happening to us. We can downregulate those physical reactions by managing the breath. And this is another one from the Andrew Huberman podcast. He talks about the double inhalation; the sigh where you breathe in once and you top it up again before you breathe out. And it's if you saw a kid in the playground. And they're after scratching their knee or they, they scuffed their knee and they'll cry and they're crying so much that they're going like that. They're actually self soothing. They're self soothing themselves emotionally. So this double inhalation can be a great way to bring that because when the breath slows down, the heart rate is going to slow down. So you can play around with your own heart rate and then do the opposite in practice, get the heart rate up, do some of the Wim Hof breathing or do some high knees and get acclimatized to performing and singing with a higher heart rate. I used to do this in the studio with singers where I would make the environment unsafe in a safe way on purpose in the room with them. So I would get them to perform, but I would look uninterested.

Michael Walker: [laughing] With a saber tooth tiger in the same room.

Gemma Sugrue: [laughing] Yeah. Unleash the tigers. Oh, I wish. That's next level. That's actually gold. And so yeah, I'd make them feel uncomfortable and unsafe and see how they regulated. See how they managed. See if it distracted them. So I think finding different ways of creating that exposure therapy in the run up to something significant is really important as well, just to grade yourself up to it.

Michael Walker: Super interesting. Yeah. So when you're practicing for it, try to simulate as much as possible what it's going to be like in the real situation, try to get your heart rate up, try to imagine as if you're actually doing it so you can prepare with the actual environment.

Gemma Sugrue: There's got to be like a VR business opportunity for us here.

Michael Walker: I'm sure there is. Yeah. I just got a vision pro about a week ago and I've played around with the quest a little bit up until this, but it's definitely a different ballpark, like the vision pro is pretty dang impressive. The eye tracking is pretty interesting. But it definitely feels like we're not too far off from digital environments feeling very real. They call it spatial computing. But it's basically VR. It's just Apple's way of making it sound cooler.

Gemma Sugrue: Extra fancy, extra expensive [laughing].

Michael Walker: But I think that there's a, there's definitely a use case for simulating an environment like what you're describing right now. They actually have a keynote environment where it's like an immersive environment where you can look around as if you're on stage at a keynote and be able to present on a presentation. It's pretty cool. Okay. So a couple of really useful tips there in terms of, both, practicing and getting prepared for it. And then what you said about the get your butterflies in formation.

Gemma Sugrue: It's nice, isn't it?

Michael Walker: It is. That's beautiful. I've never heard it articulated like that but I love that. Yeah. Get your butterflies in motion. Yeah, like you've got them and it's normal that they're going to be there, you get to decide what the meaning of those is and whether that empowers you or whether that's something that you try to shrink away from. Awesome.

So talking about peak performance for musicians and specifically the psychology of being seen and being heard… one big challenge that I hear a lot from artists is just trying to figure out what sets them apart, what makes them unique, how to find their voice, like as it relates to social media, especially early on, it can feel like it's hard to cut through the noise and find something that feels congruent with you. And because it's so different for everybody, everyone is unique. Everyone's different. And if you do the exact same thing, someone else, then it's not going to work. How do you recommend that artists start to look within and start to figure out not only what should they post and what do they enjoy posting, but also what's going to resonate with people and what is going to help them grow and be able to have a more successful career.

Gemma Sugrue: Yeah. I think the first thing I would say is that be Madonna, as in, accept that you are an evolving, changing human who's going to have different tastes, that things are going to change over time, and I think sometimes people are unsure. If I go out and see and talk about this and be this way, then what if I change my mind? What if I want to do something different? I'm like, absolutely. That's fine. Go ahead, be human. That's what we do. We change and evolve and our fascinations will go in different directions. And they're like, but what about the brand? And I'm like you're not a product. You're not an object. You're a person. It's a personal brand. And there are certain values. Definitely explore what your values are and align to them, but they're very broad umbrellas that you can exist within. And I see a lot of artists get very stuck in the branding process. Brand to me sometimes is a shield or is a way of hiding and they're like: I'll do photos and I won't look at the camera and I'll do all this mysterious artist thing. And I'm like, it's too competitive for that. Unless you're at the Beyonce level, in my opinion, or unless you've got some very clear artistic vision that's specific… With business, your money is the skin in the game. With artistry, vulnerability is the skin in the game. You should feel a little bit: Ooh, when you're putting it out there because it is a big leap. It is a very brave thing to do. But it's always an ad. You want to be a role model or create. Cause people are like: I don't want to be taking up space. They don’t want to add to the noise of the internet.And I'm like, you're not. 

You're opening something else new. You're opening up this thing in the internet now where: oh, I see a 45 year old woman who makes R&B that has some kind of sci-fi vibe to it is now a thing. Just open that space up so that somebody else might want to step into it in their own way. So I think there's a lot of great role modeling that people can do and they can see it as that and see it as an ad and an act of service. I would joke to my students to be like: Oh, that's you didn't post the video. So you just kept the video for yourself and you just watch yourself being amazing. Oh, that's fine. And we're not going to see it. Oh, that's. Fine. I see such amazing singers. I'm like, guys, this isn't just for us. We've got to let other people see it. But yeah, there's some mindset work for sure. But one of the big things I struggle with getting artists over the line with is the planning, the fine tuning, the branding, and I love all the branding and the conceptualizing. And if you were in a film, you'd be this and blah, blah, blah. And if I was a color, I'd be orange. And that means… I love all that stuff, abstracting all day, love it. But I'm like, but we've got to go out and test. We've got to go out and do. It's such an agile marketing scene. Now, it's not like you come up with your launch project protocol out it goes, it's not… You test and market. You test as you go. And you iterate and test, you have a hypothesis, you put it out. You look back, you reflect, you iterate, you go again. And so trying to get them into that more guerilla style marketing can be challenging because it's a bit scarier and it's a bit more vulnerable.

Michael Walker: Super interesting. Yeah, it definitely seems like planning can be super valuable to a certain extent, right? It's extremely valuable, but it's also easy to fall into the trap of over planning. It's like when we talked about the five second rule, it's like our minds, it's not really about planning, it's really about avoiding the fear and avoiding doing the thing and showing up and in what might happen when you actually put yourself out there, like, whether you actually like it makes you look good or it makes you look stupid. But I love the way that you put it in terms of having grace with yourself to accept that you are an evolving person and that you're not necessarily going to be perfect. And it's okay if you learn as you go and it's better to iterate and test imperfectly then to “perfectly do nothing”.

Gemma Sugrue: Yeah. And they're like, what if nobody watches? What if nobody sees it? I'm like, brilliant. Like, you get free reign to experiment and try things out and people can gather as you get better. It's actually an opportunity. And I do think… it sounds sad, but I'm also like, nobody cares. Nobody cares. No, it's great. You can do whatever you want! Nobody's worrying the way you're worrying about it. And you can just have fun with it. I have to say for the times that I remember my own journey with social media breaking through was when I did it for a laugh. I did TikTok for a laugh, I went on and I said, ah, lads, it can't be that hard. What is it? And I went on and I said, I'm going to show up, I'm going to do it. And I'm going to make stupid videos. I grew from a couple of hundred to hundreds of thousands in about two months on TikTok because I had this attitude of: ah sure… Nobody's watching. I had none of my peers or family or friends looking at me. And I just made silly videos and it blew up and I was like, Oh my God, why? But I've been snailing away on Instagram for years, but because I'm so worried about what everybody thinks of me on Instagram, that I won't put, be a bit weird and a bit wild.

Michael Walker: Super interesting. Yeah. The being willing to play” and just to understand that you don't take yourself too seriously. Like it's okay. It's about having fun and it's okay to look silly or stupid or to fall on your face probably even makes it more entertaining than if you are trying to be too perfect.

Gemma Sugrue: Yeah, people want you to be relatable. I think that's where the uniqueness is when you're imperfect or you're not trying to polish everything and hide. I think that people like to see that. It doesn't need to be a full time blooper reel or anything, but just be real in a real way. Cause I can see that there's like synthetic realness as well on TikTok that I'm like: Oh, come on. But, I think people can see through when it's really real.

Michael Walker: Yeah. The quote that just came to mind was that, the cracks are where the light gets in. Who says that? Maybe someone can remind me who that quote's from, but yeah, the cracks are where the light gets in and it seems like a beautiful reminder that it really is like our flaws or the spots of us that are imperfect, that in a lot of cases are what gives us flavor or gives us character. Um, I do see we have some folks who are chatting here. So let me see if anyone asked any questions.

Joe, Eddie said yay, Gemma, appreciate this a lot. Sailing away. Awesome. Voz asked a question here. He was curious about recording videos and was interested specifically in reading scripts / do you have any recommendations for how to read a script while making a video recording cuz I have trouble looking directly into the camera when I'm reading the text. That's interesting.

Gemma Sugrue: Ooh. Okay. I do a mixture of both. I have a prompt that I put up on my Canon camera, and you can get prompts on your iPhone as well, where the text is scrolling by, you're reading it, and then you're looking into the camera.

That works pretty well. However, no matter how much personality I put in, how much i put into it, and even when I deviate from the script, personally, for me, any video that's done well on YouTube, I've never been on script. I think there's a correlation. I think some of your charisma gets lost without the script. Now I think it's okay at the beginning, maybe, but I would encourage you, or maybe suggest: what about going with bullet points? So you just have your bullet point and you speak to the camera and you just only have to look to the bullet point and trust that you'll have the content, but I actually think it just comes across… this is just another level of communication that comes across when we get away from the script. But saying that, I use a script often, but I've noticed the videos never do as well. Even though I have perfectly constructed all the things and everything is exactly succinctly how I wanted to say it, but for some reason, there's some connection gets lost.

Michael Walker: Interesting. Yeah. I've had that same experience too. And I know that there's a lot of people that I respect a lot who use scripts for doing video recordings and for them, they like it a lot. So maybe it is a personal thing, but I've had a similar experience where it feels like when I'm totally going scripted, it doesn't feel as authentic or doesn't feel as organic to me and it feels a little bit too tight. But it does seem like there's a lot of tools lately too VoZ that are specifically designed to help with reading a script and then change your eyes so it makes it look like you actually are looking at the camera. I don't know if they're quite there yet. There's one called Descript, that is awesome. I love that as like a video editor tool in general, but they have an AI feature that lets you read a script and look slightly off the camera and it'll change your eyes to make it look like you're looking at the camera and I've used it and it works, it's just like a little bit weird. It's just a little bit like you could tell you that something is a little bit off where you'll probably notice it, but most people won't notice it. Cause like Gemma mentioned, most people just really aren't thinking that much about it or really care that much, not nearly as much as we care about it. But yeah I agree with what Gemma just shared there in terms of if you can, get to a point where you just have some bullets and you're speaking from your heart and you just be yourself, then it does seem like that tends to land better over time.

Gemma Sugrue: Yeah, we're always trying to balance that warmth and competence thing. Like to come across well as a human, you need to have warmth and you need to have competence. And I think the scripting really covers us in terms of competence. We're nice and succinct and everything is covered, but we actually need a little bit of ‘um’ and ‘ah’. We need a little bit of ‘Oh no, nevermind’, ‘Yeah’, ‘and then’. Because then we really feel like it's happening. It's the same in a performance. I don't know if you've ever had this where you're watching somebody sing or you're watching somebody perform and they've just experienced that phrase in that way for the first time. You're like: something brand new has happened to them and I can feel it. I have done it with a script, but then I'll go off script. And I do think that adds that little bit of extra magic to it. Michael Walker Smart. All right. So Gemma, thank you so much for taking the time to come on here today and have a discussion. I don't think I've ever talked to someone on the podcast about cold plunges and some of the territory that we came into today. It's something that I'm personally really passionate about as well is, personal development, biohacking and just health stuff in general. Thank-you for coming on here and sharing some of the lessons that you've learned and how to help face the fear that comes up with being an artist and being seen. For anyone who's here right now, who's interested in learning more, diving deeper into what you're doing and what you offer, what would be the best place for them to go to dive deeper?

Gemma Sugrue: Yeah, so my website is gemmasugrue.com and then I run a program called True Artist Mastermind, which is a split between working with our composition coaches. We have Jet Vesper and Ali Moss and they run our co-writes and they run our compositional training and then I run the marketing side of things and helping you with your artist habits. And it's a really nice, tight cohort of people. Really great. Everyone wants to do this for real and wants to release their music consistently, wants to write music consistently. So yeah, so True Artist is my main baby.

Michael Walker: Beautiful. Like always, we'll put the links on the show notes for easy access and I just think there's so much value building community and networking and being surrounded by people who are like you and different and hopefully a little further along in some cases that can give you a place to not feel alone as you're doing this and to actually be able to take action. So what you're describing around, like providing feedback and community I think is awesome. So thanks for what you do. And I would totally encourage anyone who's listening to this right now, who's resonated with this to go check it out.

Gemma Sugrue: I appreciate you Michael!

Michael Walker: Hey, it’s Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guest today, and if you want to support the podcast then there’s a few ways to help us grow. First if you hit ‘subscribe’ then that’s make sure you don’t miss a new episode. Secondly if you share it with your friends, on social media, tag us - that really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review it’s going to help us reach more musicians like you take their music to the next level. The time to be a Modern Musician is now, and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.